Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testifies before House Oversight Committee

Michael Cohen’s legal team admitted Wednesday that, after the FBI raided his home and office last year, he asked President Donald Trump’s lawyers about a potential pardon.

Now reporters are trying to nail down the specifics of exactly what happened in those discussions. Federal prosecutors could be looking into the topic, too. And President Trump himself claimed in a Friday morning tweet that Cohen “directly asked” him for a pardon, adding, “I said NO.”

Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday generally did not reflect well on the character of President Donald Trump. He accused Trump of committing crimes while in office; lying to the public about his business dealings in Russia and tacitly encouraging Cohen to do the same; and ordering Cohen to bully Trump’s alma maters out of releasing his school records.

But the most contentious moments between Democrats and Republicans on the committee were about racism — or rather, whether it was appropriate to use the word “racist” to describe first Trump himself, and then Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC).

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a prominent supporter of President Trump, appeared to threaten former Trump attorney Michael Cohen on Twitter late Tuesday afternoon — one day before Cohen testifies before the House Oversight Committee about Trump’s business deals and hush money payments to women who alleged affairs with Trump during the 2016 campaign.

Gaetz, who has represented Florida’s First Congressional District since 2017, tweeted, “Hey Michael Cohen - Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot...”

On Wednesday, February 27, Michael Cohen — President Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer — is scheduled to publicly testify before the House Oversight Committee. The hearing begins at 10 am ET and can be watched live online on the committee’s website.

The hearing promises to be explosive. While questions specifically about Russia will be off the table due to special counsel Robert Mueller’s continuing investigation, Cohen will be questioned about Trump’s business practices and hush money payments to women who alleged affairs with Trump during the 2016 campaign.

Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former attorney, tried to rig online polls in favor of Trump by paying a man to code an algorithm that would vote for Trump in two public surveys, according to a new report by the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Rothfeld, Rob Barry, and Joe Palazzolo.

Cohen hired the same man — John Gauger, owner of RedFinch Solutions LLC — to create a Twitter account called @WomenForCohen that attempted to establish the lawyer as a sex symbol.

Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer who once said he would take a bullet for the president, would like you to know he’s sorry now that he’s been sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to multiple crimes.

Cohen spoke with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos for an interview aired on Good Morning America on Friday. He said he followed a “bad path” out of loyalty to Trump and that he would “not be the villain” of Trump’s story.

The bad news for Michael Cohen is that he’s been sentenced to a 36-month prison term for tax evasion, campaign finance violations (involving hush-money payments made on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump), and lying to Congress about President Trump’s efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. And he’ll have to pay $500,000 in forfeiture and $1.4 million in restitution.

The good news is that when he goes to prison, his room and board will be free.

Michael Cohen will be heading to prison.

After pleading guilty to financial crimes, campaign finance violations, and lying to Congress, the president’s former lawyer was sentenced by Judge William Pauley to three years of incarceration Wednesday.

On Friday, federal prosecutors accused President Donald Trump of directing and coordinating illegal payments that his longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, made shortly before the 2016 election to two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump. Cohen has already pleaded guilty to felonies related to the payments.

But if you thought this might sway Republican senators to publicly rebuke Trump or even express concern about his alleged involvement in crimes, think again. In the days since last Friday, at least seven of them have already indicated that Trump can count on their continued support.

Hours after an ABC News report on Thursday that Michael Cohen had spent hours talking to special counsel Robert Mueller’s team about Trump’s Russia ties, the man himself decided to weigh in on the topic.

Or at least, his Twitter account did — in the third person:

Michael Cohen has been talking to special counsel Robert Mueller.

The former Trump lawyer has sat for hours of interviews with the special counsel’s team in recent weeks to discuss President Trump’s ties to Russia, ABC News reported Thursday. (Vanity Fair first reported last week that Cohen had been talking to Mueller’s team.)

Did Michael Cohen and his lawyer Lanny Davis hoodwink the media?

Late last month, in the midst of a federal investigation into Cohen, sources close to the former Trump lawyer made a bombshell claim to CNN. They said that, according to Cohen, Donald Trump himself knew in advance about his son Don Jr.’s secret meeting with a Russian delegation during the 2016 campaign. These anonymous sources added that Cohen would be happy to tell special counsel Robert Mueller all about this. And other media outlets, such as the Washington Post, soon heard similar things from a source close to Cohen.

Trump Organization finance chief Allen Weisselberg has been granted immunity in exchange for giving prosecutors information for the investigation into Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen and the hush money payments Cohen made to women during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The Trump Organization CFO’s cooperation is the latest twist in the Manhattan US attorney’s office’s prosecution of Cohen, which began with an FBI raid in April. This week, Cohen pleaded guilty to eight federal charges, implicating the president of the United States in those crimes.

As special counsel Robert Mueller continues to investigate and indict people close to the president, Donald Trump has some strong opinions on cooperating with prosecutors: Flipping “almost ought to be outlawed,” he said in an interview with Fox & Friends’ Ainsley Earhardt, which aired Thursday morning.

Trump said that flipping — a.k.a. cooperating with investigators in exchange for a better deal — was unjust and unfair while he threw jabs at his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who on Tuesday pleaded guilty in federal court to campaign finance violations related to hush money payments he made to porn actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election cycle.

Senate Republicans will tell you that the news this week implicating President Donald Trump in a campaign finance felony is serious — and it looks like they intend to do absolutely nothing about it.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations related to hush money payments he made to porn actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election cycle — and said Trump directed him to do it.

President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to eight federal crimes yesterday, the most incendiary of them related to paying hush money to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, women with whom Trump allegedly had affairs, ahead of the 2016 election.

Relatively speaking, Cohen’s five counts of tax evasion seem more mundane, though they did come with some interesting details. As with former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort’s trial earlier this month, Cohen’s court appearance provided an unexpected view into the world of luxury fashion.

A brief segment of a Fox & Friends interview released this afternoon by Fox News features President Donald Trump repeatedly emphasizing that the hush money payments at the center of Michael Cohen’s guilty plea were not made with campaign funds. There’s just one problem: That doesn’t exonerate him at all.

In context, Trump appears to be trying to say that this exonerates him, but the opposite is the case — you can’t just evade campaign finance rules by paying for your campaign expenses with non-campaign funds. If you could, the rules would be meaningless.

Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, effectively turned on his former boss on Tuesday by implicating him in federal crimes related to illegal campaign contributions. That was shocking, since Cohen had earlier claimed he would take a bullet for Trump.

So why did Cohen flip? Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, offered a surprising answer on Wednesday: Trump’s actions during his July meeting in Helsinki with Russian President Vladimir Putin were what finally convinced him to turn on Trump.

Michael Cohen’s confession in open court late yesterday that he violated campaign finance law to cover up an alleged affair between Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels — and that he did so at Trump’s direction — is a stunning moment in American politics.

It’s also a reminder that while the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign and possible involvement in said meddling by Trump or members of his circle is important, it’s hardly the only line of inquiry into Trump’s conduct for which there’s a legitimate basis.

Tuesday, August 21, 2018, is a day that will live in the minds and hearts of journalists and news junkies across America for years to come.

In very rapid succession, the day saw two major associates of President Donald Trump — Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen — found guilty of serious crimes carrying years-long prison sentences in federal court. It saw another Trump aide, Larry Kudlow, facing accusations that he palled around with a prominent white nationalist. It saw a major Trump ally in Congress indicted for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign money on personal expenses. And it ended with Trump giving a speech in Charleston, West Virginia, that turned into an orgy of pointless digressions and threats to unravel NATO.

Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, has entered into a plea deal with federal prosecutors for the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. He pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges on eight counts in a Manhattan federal court on Tuesday afternoon.

Cohen was charged with five counts of tax evasion from 2012 to 2016, one count of making a false statement to a financial institution from February 2015 to April 2016, one count of being a “willful cause” of an unlawful corporate contribution from June 2016 to October 2016, and one count of making an excessive campaign contribution on October 27. 2016.

Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime personal and business attorney, has pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges, including two campaign finance charges stemming from his payment of hush money to women with whom Trump allegedly had affairs. What’s more, he admitted that “an unnamed candidate” directed him to make the hush money payments — that is, Donald Trump.

At this point, it’s quite well established that two women — porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal — received hush money for affairs they said they had with Trump. But it’s possible that the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which reached the deal with Cohen, has information on more women as well.

President Donald Trump suffered a heckuva one-two punch on Tuesday afternoon. Not only was his former campaign manager Paul Manafort convicted of eight crimes stemming from his pre-Trump work as a consultant, but Trump’s former longtime lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to eight counts including tax fraud and campaign finance law violations during the 2016 campaign.

For a tip as to how he got into this predicament, the president might want to turn to the Twitter feed of noted American management expert Donald Trump, who tweeted this in 2014:

The thought that must keep Michael Cohen up at night as he surrenders to the FBI in advance of pleading guilty to $20 million in bank fraud and other crimes is the knowledge that it’s almost inconceivable he’d have faced prosecution if not for the fact that his former boss got himself elected president of the United States.

The same is true, of course, of Paul Manafort, another former employee of Trump’s. Indeed, Manafort’s attorneys made the argument in court — and the judge seemed somewhat sympathetic — that in effect, the whole prosecution was illegitimate because everyone knew special counsel Robert Mueller was only bringing the case because he was hoping to turn Manafort into a cooperating witness.